You eat what you are

Amazing collection on Good by Mark Menjivar. It’s a photo essay on the contents of people’s fridges. Short, one-line descriptions give the barest of details, so it’s interesting what you find yourself inferring from the rest of the image – the contents and state of the fridge – to build up a picture in your own head about what this person might be like. Some of them are unbearably sad. Below are two images and Good’s description of the collection. See the original post here, or the full set at Mark Menjivar’s website.

We purchase refrigerators the way we fill them: out of necessity—to preserve the milk; to keep the greens from wilting. But from the right vantage point, an open fridge is the perfect staging grounds for a discussion of consumption. And if the aphorism holds true—if we really are what we eat—then refrigerators are like windows into our souls. It’s that sentiment that’s at the heart of Mark Menjivar’s inventive exploration of hunger, “You Are What You Eat,” for which he photographed the contents of strangers’ refrigerators. As you can see, whether it holds neatly ordered rows of labels-out condiments or zip-locked stacks of shot-and-gutted buck meat, there’s almost certainly a narrative to a fridge’s arrangement.